


gold in the sunrise

by sunshatteredseas



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Angst, Gen, Heavy Angst, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-05
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2019-05-18 10:03:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14850695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunshatteredseas/pseuds/sunshatteredseas
Summary: hawke isn't quite sure what to make of this 'battle of kirkwall' business.





	gold in the sunrise

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to cartographicalspine for proof-reading and helping me make sense of all this!

“Hawke?”

The voice comes from around the corner of the dark alley, roughly, drunkenly worried; too loud and too laden with memories for her to smile. It bounces around the cobbled tiles, around the empty, dull spaces of battles she’s ever so quickly repressed, and reaches her as she leans against the wall, eyes closed and face down.

“Hawke, we’ve all been--Maker, Hawke, are you alright?” Varric's smile is strained and too quickly dropped, eyes changing into something dark and unyielding; he casts away his previous drunk neutrality like a disposable mask gilded with golden leaf and happy tidings. She knows the method perhaps with a bit too much familiarity, leaving her to wonder absent-mindedly if it was all a masquerade from the second she’d stumbled out of the crumbling Gallows to this moment, now, as she braces her back against the cold, slimy bricks of the docks. Perhaps, then, she was the guest of honor. A pity.

Varric seats himself next to her, crossbow clattering to the floor in his hurry, and her face comes up, dark brown eyes dull and flickering.

“Bianca...”

“Bianca can wait, Hawke.” It shocks her, this quickly-stated admission, eyes a little too desperate. Bianca has never waited a day in her life, not the crossbow or the person from the quiet wisps of tales Varric tells when he is staggeringly, smashingly, almost incoherently drunk.

“I knew we shouldn’t have left you alone...I knew we shouldn’t have…”

Varric’s voice swims in and out of vision (some barely conscious part of her tells her that you can’t see a voice, but then she takes another swig from the bottle clutched between her fingers and that part vanishes like all the rest) but when she comes to he is blaming himself like always, head bowed and face blank, shadowed, distant.

“Varric…?”

“Hawke,” he replies. His voice kind of breaks a little, then, when that smile forces itself back on his face, and she wants to tell him he doesn’t need to but if he doesn’t then they’re just two drunk wrecks crying in an alley and what would that say about Kirkwall?

“Varric, I’m not dead,” she murmurs, bottle lying loose in her hands, and for a moment it seems like an incomprehensibly terrible twist of fate (she deserved to be dead she should be dead Maker why can’t she _die_ ) and then she remembers Fenris and his gentle smiles and thanks the world for cruel little mercies, however mistaken.

“I’m not dead, but oh Varric, shouldn’t I be?”

The sun is rising off of the docks, sunlight shattering through the broken pieces of glass scattered on the stone, and Varric shakes his head. “I failed you.”

She laughs through her tears at that and crushes the remains of the glass shards under one worn boot, falling apart at the seams. “Perhaps. Perhaps not.” The little pieces fracture the rapidly brightening light into little beams, like the glass might divide and conquer the sun.

It has all fallen apart, Hawke thinks, watching the light ripple across the docks, watching Kirkwall come alive once more, bakers and merchants brushing aside grey rubble and adding the same finery to their flimsy tables and cheap wares. As if it mattered when the sky had fallen and yet remained, untouchable, in a clear pane of glass stained a bright pink and gentle midnight blue.

“We deserved more,” she whispers, voice hoarse, and his eyes like a wiped slate watch those same traders all live so certainly, even with doubt in the air heavy as any tangible thing. “We all deserved so much more than--than _this_.”

Even with the debris of the Gallows falling into the sea with thunderous splashes every minute, even with the guard’s armor still dented and worn and dusty, tired, haunted eyes, the city churned. Relentlessly, undeniably, indestructibly. Who was she to imagine that she had guarded it when in the end, there she laid, broken, as the sun rose on Kirkwall like every other day?

In the end, she had changed nothing. In the end, she had been the harbinger of ruin, and had brought little else.

“Hawke…”, he repeats, and she flinches away. “What do you want, Hawke?”

She bites back her immediate response-- _a drink, a knife, a new life_ \--and shakes her head.

“Find me somewhere quiet, where I can't hurt anyone else.” If the request pains him he doesn’t show; Varric nods quietly, painstakingly slowly, and turns back to the bay, somewhere between sea and sky.

The things left unsaid weigh on their shoulders like shards of rock on mountains, hardly enough to break what has already been shattered; and yet she does not think she can bear another shadowed glance in his pained face.

“Just...tell me a story, Varric?”

His eyes are gold in the sunrise.


End file.
